One of the big things holding us back from building a lithium industry in our own backyard has been that it would, you know, wreck the backyard. That left us at the mercy of market swings and not-always-friendly foreign supply chains for the most critical ingredient to defossilize our economy. Then, Lilac showed up. Their extraction tech uses 99% less land and water as conventional methods, while recovering lithium at a fraction of the cost. Suddenly landscape-friendly energy independence doesn’t seem like such a fantasy. Now, with a fresh $145m Lilac is well on its way to building a lithium supply chain that supports U.S. interests, without turning America the Beautiful into America the Open Pit MineTM.
To appreciate what makes Lilac such an economic and environmental upgrade, you need to understand the straight up medieval way lithium is currently mined.
The vast majority of the world’s untapped lithium resources is in underground brines. These are salty pools of water hundreds to thousands of meters under the surface. The technology — if you want to call it that — that most suppliers rely on is evaporation. They pump the water up to the surface into beautifully horrible ponds the size of 4,000 football fields and then wait. After a couple years of letting the water evaporate, only then do they actually start the process of extracting the metal that will end up in batteries. This process contributes to soil degradation, biodiversity loss, depleted aquifers, and a whole range of downstream ecosystem damage that local communities usually don’t love. Even then, these facilities typically recover less than half of the available lithium.
What if I told you there was a way to nearly triple lithium recovery rates and slash costs while using only one percent of the land and water? Meet Lilac. Their process is based on a proprietary ion-exchange process they call Lilac IX that uses ceramic beads made of materials lithium loves to bind to. Brines from underground reservoirs are pumped through tanks full of the beads, the beads suck up the lithium, and the water is injected back from whence it came. It gets better. The process works even when the concentration of lithium in the brines is low. So resources that can’t be developed economically with evaporation ponds are suddenly in the money with Lilac’s tech. Their plants are 10x faster to build, cleaner to run, and cheaper to operate. It’s not a fair fight.
None of this is hypothetical. Lilac has already run this tech at a real-life plant, showing off the performance, reliability, and operability of their ion exchange tech at scale. That facility ran continuously for months, with 90% uptime during 24/7 operations. They even had multiple third-party engineers come in to double- and triple-check their numbers. Sure enough, they held up, along with the operations win of producing over 200,000 liters of lithium chloride (the stuff that later gets converted to battery-grade lithium) with 99.9% purity.
Now, with their doubters suddenly very quiet and nine figures of cash in the bank, Lilac is bringing their tech to an iconic American spot: the Great Salt Lake. Turns out the lake is a massive lithium resource, but its concentrations of the mineral are lower than traditional developers can profitably or technologically recover without turning the largest saltwater lake in the Western Hemisphere into one giant evaporation pond. Lilac, on the other hand, is already recovering high percentages of the lithium from Salt Lake brines, with the potential to multiply America’s domestic lithium production with minimal waste. Most important for local communities, Lilac’s operation won’t impact water levels of this drought-hammered lake — something traditional developers could never dream of saying.
If this all sounds cool to you, imagine how the large battery makers and automakers feel. Clean, pure, fast lithium sourced right in the U.S.? The phone is ringing off the hook. The company is already hammering out deals with many of these folks, who can’t wait to tap into a Made in America supply of battery-grade lithium. If you want to secure a stable supply of lithium for your own battery manufacturing, get those conversations started here.
Phrases like “step change” get thrown around a lot in this line of work, but make no mistake, this news is a big deal. It’s big for Lilac, it’s big for the country, it’s big for the planet. By flipping the script on lithium production, Lilac is putting meat on the bones of all our state, national, and even global EV targets. Even if you believe shrinking sea ice and record-setting ocean surface temperatures are part of an elaborate hoax, you gotta love what this means for U.S. energy independence, economic growth, and even national security. Lithium in my backyard? Hell yeah, I’m a LIMBY!
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